In the recent years, there have been significant advancements in the areas of scientific data management and retrieval techniques, particularly in terms of standards and protocols for archiving data and metadata. Scientific data is generally rich, not easy to understand, and spread across different places. In order to integrate these pieces together, a data archive and associated metadata should be generated. This data should be stored in a format that can be locatable, retrievable and understandable, more importantly it should be in a form that will continue to be accessible as technology changes, such as XML. New search technologies are being implemented around these protocols, which makes searching easy, fast and yet robust. One such system, Mercury, a metadata harvesting, data discovery, and access system, built for researchers to search to, share and obtain spatiotemporal data used across a range of climate and ecological sciences.